Now that we have some colors, we can start to use them on our table. Lets start with rows. The following table will have rows which are colored white and light cyan alternatively, using the previously defined color “LightCyan”:

Furthermore, coloring rows alternatively is similarly easy. This time we are using light gray (defined above) and white. Here it makes sense to define a new colored column type, so we don’t have to retype the thing every time:

\newcolumntype{g}{>{\columncolor{Gray}}c}

The name of the new column type is “g”. If you only need to color one column you may want to use >{\columncolor{Gray}}c in the tabular environment definition directly.

You can combine the two in case you want to alternatively color rows, but not the first column. Use the defined, colored row type to color all the data columns and recolor the title row as well as every second data-row white:

[…] Texblog had an interesting post on creating tables with alternating colors. See the pdf for the final output. I thought that it will be interesting to see how to reproduce the same effect in ConTeXt. This is the table that I am going to use for my tests: […]

Thanks for this – really helpful. I just wanted to say that \columncolor doesn’t work well with \cline – the colour of the column obscures the line – and that if you wish to colour a table that uses \cline you should switch to \hhline instead.

You’d have to be a bit more specific. A figure is usually loaded from a separate file. Therefore, I don’t see how you’d want to color it. See the PGF/TikZ package for how to generate figures with LaTeX.